The adoption of mobile phones in the world has been nothing short of phenomenal over the last two decades. The International Telecommunication Union estimated that by 2011 there were more than 5 billion mobile phones in the world. Of these 5 billion phones, 80% (4 billion) were simple basic phones, while 20% (1 billion) were smart phones. On top of offering basic telephony, smart phones have transformed their users' lives by delivering the power and functionality of traditional computers especially through smart phone applications (“apps”). On the other hand, users of basic phones have, for the most part, been left out of the “mobile computing revolution” due to the limited hardware and software capabilities of the devices. The primary limitations include limited screen size, lack of access to local, on phone, computation and storage, and lack of features such as cameras, GPS sensors and accelerometers, and lack of browser and data capabilities.
Nevertheless, basic phones can still provide access to compute power to a user by leveraging the ability of voice, and especially protocols such as SMS (Short Message Service) and USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data). Such protocols communicate with a remote server, which does the computation and storage, and then transmits results back to the user.
Even so, the number of applications running on basic phones is orders of magnitude less than the number running on smart phones. The limited capabilities afforded by voice, SMS and USSD means that only a small subset of smart phone applications' functionalities can be implemented directly on a basic phone. On top of this, if one is to convert an existing smart phone application for basic phone use, it entails rewriting most of the application's code from scratch and running it on an application server.
There is currently no way to automatically convert a smart phone application to a basic phone application. The manual process requires a developer to first run the smart phone application, and determine the functionalities of the app. The developer then decides which subset of these functionalities is possible to implement for basic phone users. More specifically, there are not systems or methods in place that address the key challenges to automatically converting a smart phone app to a basic phone version. These challenges include 1) quick identification of supported and unsupported functionalities of an app for a basic phone; 2) immediate access to the existing 1.6 million or more available apps on a basic phone; and 3) no automated or standardized method to convert an app to a basic phone version.
Relevant art: US 20110136461; US 20100251231.